Okay, so this year I’m going to be participating in the 12 Days of Anime and I decided that I’d like to focus on some of the characters I really liked, or found interesting, in 2018, but for whatever reason they won’t end up on any of my favourite character lists.
So for Day 1 I’m going to look at Siluca Meletes from Record of Grancrest War.
Now Siluca starts out as a great character. She’s a young, plucky mage, fresh out and going to serve a lord that she’s already decided is a womanizer and someone she doesn’t want to work with citing the uniform he put her in as solid evidence that she should pass. On the way there she runs into Theo, a young man determined to gain power and free his island from whatever. And so she joins forces with him and helps him rise to power.
Great story, right?
And it probably would have been in slightly defter hands. However, because of the choppy nature of the narrative, Siluca, who starts out all strong and smart does get to spend some episodes devising plans, being overly ambitious and getting Theo in and out of trouble. She even gets to fight once or twice and show off some of her really cool magic tricks.
And then it all goes sideways for her as a character.
As much as I loved Theo and Siluca together, as soon as Siluca became an official love interest, the story all but sidelined her. She occasionally gets to be in the same scene as Theo and she’s certainly there for the dramatic revelations at the end, but mostly she becomes background. The one or two shining moments she gets swiftly get buried under an avalanche of other things happening in the story and the need for Theo to ultimately be the hero.
Here is a character who well and truly gets butchered for the sake of narrative convenience. Her brains, her strength as a mage, all of the things that made her so delightful early on get toned down until she’s essentially the sound board for Theo and moral support. It is such a shame because she is a character with incredible potential, and it is horrendously squandered here.
For once, I am crying out for a prequel. Let us see Siluca before she met Theo, as a young mage learning her craft. She would be a delight and we would get to see her character as she truly could have been.
Siluca Meletes, you deserved a better anime.
Tomorrow I turn my attention to Shimada in March Comes in Like a Lion.
Thanks for reading
Karandi James
Consider supporting the blog by:
Or, use one of my product affiliate links.
RECORD OF GRANCREST WAR 1/7 SCALE PRE-PAINTED FIGURE: SILUCA MELETES
I feel like this happens to many times in fiction. The writer will take a strong, and capable female character, but change her to either be moral support, or a damsel in distress. Can’t think of the last time it stuck to me personally. Also, doesn’t seem like Theo helped matters not being as interesting of a character in comparison making it stick out even more so.
It does happen a lot and it would be nice to see it happen less often.
I really like Siluca from what I saw of the show (almost the entire first cour) so one of the reasons why I hesitate to finish it is because I keep hearing she gets sidelined.
Definitely sidelined which is a real shame because she was a fun character.
Though realistically that is just one of many problems Record of Grancrest War is facing.
Just a thought but shouldn’t you keep the subject of your next post a secret so people can be surprised by who it is, instead of telling them now? 😉 🙂
I think I did for most of the other posts. But I am not really counting down best characters or anything so it really doesn’t matter if people know in advance what is coming.
I never really liked Siluca. I did like that warrior friend of hers, Aishela, but that had more to do with her being a crazy, beautiful destroyer woman who could *like* the average guy she just tried to kill. It’s like that line from Wonder Woman, “I am simultaneously terrified and aroused.”
Aishela never did much for me. She was just kind of there. It would have been nice to learn more about her so that events later in the story had more impact.
I liked Siluca, but I think my biggest issue with her was just that she basically made all of the decisions for Theo. Not really HER fault per se, and more just that her character was more capable than Theo who couldn’t seem to make up his own mind about anything without a push. Indecisive protagonists tend to bother me though. Theo felt odd to me specifically because he seemed too incapable compared to Siluca.
So I guess you are right in saying that Siluca deserved a better anime, or at least better characters to work with!
Yes, she needed a better plot, and a better live interest to really make her shine.